The community is full of rabble, these people don’t understand why the price of ZEC is so low, they are still asking for all kinds of bullshit functions, thinking that more people will accept ZEC if they have various functions.
Wanting to have every function is the worst. Do what you do best and you can stand out.
Of course, a decision must be made to cancel the Dev Fund, otherwise ZEC will only become a historical specimen, a teaching material for zero-knowledge proof, rather than a practical product. I don’t want to remind it anymore.
2 Likes
Hi, thank you for expressing your opinion. Can you elaborate more on why do you think the dev fund is bad for Zcash?
5 Likes
One of my metaphors for why the Dev Fund is not good for Zcash is because it is in affect creating a Pentagon budget situation.
(Over its 8 years) It incentivizes/d over-spending and make-work activities that ultimately didn’t add correlative value to Zcash (see relative network use, ecosystem size, and ZEC chart).
The Pentagon is famous for finding exciting ways to demand and spend more money, yet do Americans really feel safer each year? Is all of this spending on war institutions positively increasing America’s perception around the world? Is Zcash the crypto equivalent to the F-35?
Spend it or Lose it also comes to mind, it is a budgeting and planning pitfall that is known to hurt organizations financially and productively.
Whenever ZEC is freely distributed to the big 3, they’re effectively forced to spend as a means of demonstrating some ongoing productive effort.
The block reward (more broadly referred to as the Devtax by crypto natives) should be acknowledged as a widely known and negatively perceived meme - this is bad for Zcash. We as a community should be forming ideas and actions that can become positive and simply digested memes about Zcash (for example: Privacy Is Normal, Zcash Media content, HTTP Bitcoin/ HTTPS Zcash)
3 Likes
I like the F-35 analogy, it came to mind for me as well as I read OP’s post. (The idea being that the F-35 is a jack of all trades, master of none, thus ending up over-budget and under-delivering).
I don’t think the analogy quite fits though, so let me make up my own: Zcash is a car engine manufacturer. We’ve got a 1000HP engine for sale, but it’s a bit too heavy to put in a Porsche, it’s turbocharged so it doesn’t jive well in the American Muscle market whose owners love their naturally-aspirated V12s, and it’s too expensive for the JDM market. We don’t really know what we need to change on the engine to get sales, so we’ve been upgrading it with titanium piston rods and such like and now we’ve even made it collision-proof. We know it’s possible to build one hell of a car with it, but it just doesn’t fit right with any of the car designs that are out there.
Our engine design doesn’t adapt to the feedback we’re getting from prospective buyers, and we’re trying our best to build our own car around it. In our attempts to build our own car around it, we’re running into some of the same problems our prospective customers had, and our expertise is not in building entire cars.
That is to say, from everything I’ve seen I don’t think the dev fund has suffered from spending-for-the-sake-of-spending, the engine has continually gotten better and better with very little waste in our efforts to increase its horsepower, but what’s missing is that feedback-driven design we need to follow to get our engine into next year’s Porsche 911.
4 Likes
On the devtax meme, I think cutting the dev fund might create an even more harmful meme: “the Zcash community no longer has funding to improve their software and keep the network secure, therefore it will stagnate.”
I think the best possible meme for Zcash to have would be: “The Zcash community is well-funded and it’s obviously paying off. The protocol is adapting and attracting more and more use cases, more developers are building on Zcash, more users are joining, and the growth rate looks exponential.”
IMO it’ll take some major changes to get there, but we can absolutely have that kind of meme.
5 Likes